Soul Food Farm, the Tour

My friend, Jessica, works in the office at Chez Panisse. A tour of the farm that raises Chez P’s meat chickens was organized for the employees and their guests, so, naturally, I went. I had never seen a chicken farm before and although I normally abstain from the said meat, it is because I have a tremendous reverence and respect for the animals. Therein lies my interest in attending the tour.

I peeled myself out of bed on Sunday morning, stopped at Genova’s (an old and locally famous deli in Temescal) to get sandwiches for lunch, and met with Jess at her house in El Cerrito. Her and her partner, Russ, have an awesome container garden in their backyard. El Cerrito switched from small recycling bins to large cans, so Russ goes around retrieving the old bins for use as planters. They come complete with drainage holes and everything, and provide enough room for several little rows of seedlings.

Then, Jessica and I were off to Vacaville, where the fog does not make it in the hot sun. Our little East Bay selves were roasting (just like the fate of them chickens). 

Soul Food Farms is owned and run by Alexis and Eric Koefoed and lies just a couple minutes from the 80 freeway, but is flanked on one side by oak-speckled hills that give the feeling of seclusion. Alexis studied viticulture (raising grapes for wine), and bought the land for that purpose. Soon after, however, grapes took a downturn on the market, and Alexis and Eric sort of “fell into” chicken raising. The niche was there, and they reshaped to fit it.

 Now, they have 3000 laying hens and 10,000 meat birds, as well as a couple llamas and dogs. 

Alexis showed our group around, starting with the meat chickens. They come as chicks in the mail from a hatchery in Pennsylvania– the only hatchery in the U.S. that breeds this special French variety. The chickens were separated by age, which is calculated in weeks. At nine weeks, the chickens are “harvested” and sent to buyers, including Chez Panisse. A Sept. 2007 SF Chronicle article (“Raising Poultry the New-Old Way”) reported the chickens were harvested at 12 weeks. During our tour, Alexis emphasized the importance of harvesting at nine weeks, noting that this was the prime age for the best taste.

The same aforementioned Chronicle article discussed the balance between intimate, small-scale arrangement and industrial-like organization: “streamlining will help, but they’re wary of heading too far down the road toward higher production and efficiency.” Indeed, the chickens seemed much more organized than those at Green String, which, I think, is good for the chickens. Although, the structure did seem to highlight the purpose– these are for eating. It was slightly disturbing to hear people on the tour joke about how tasty the chickens were going to be, and about naming them before eating them. Like I said: reverence and respect. 

And nine weeks does seem like a short little chicken life, but, you know, those chickens looked good— happy, I mean. Olive trees were planted for the double use of shade for the chickens and the fruit for pressing into oil. They obviously had no diseases and there were no sore, featherless spots that are the indicator of pecking and fighting. 

The laying hens wander about the property and have a significantly longer life than the meat chickens. Alexis and Eric search about the property daily to look for eggs that have been laid in bushes and under trees— the prototypical Easter egg hunt. The llamas and hens hang out together under a big tree. There are no roosters, as Eric and Alexis said they cause too much drama and tension amongst the hens. Although, once, someone abandoned a little Bantam rooster on their property, and the humor of this one little rooster crowing everyday and surveying his harem of 3000 prompted Eric and Alexis to keep him. 

That is, until the day he disappeared– a predator must have snatched him, Alexis said. Well, we’ve all gotta eat.

Bounty of Ideas at Slow Food Nation

As I thoroughly described in my last post, I was in attendance at Slow Food Nation’s “Food For Thought” speaker series on Saturday, August 30th. Following are my notes  as well as some thoughts of the discussion on Climate Change and Food, which included Wes Jackson, Carl Pope, Ari Bernstein, Patrick Holden, and Anna Lappe, and was moderated by Mark Hertsgaard.

 The talk began on a somber note, as projections of drastic decreases in crop yields as a result of climate change was discussed, as well as potential future problems with water availability for those crops. 

Wes Jackson countered that the actual changes that will take place as a result of climate change are unpredictable, and Carl Pope stated that it is that very unpredictability which may lead to our demise. “We are a weedy species,” Pope said, “we adapt– but we cannot adapt to uncertainty.” Just one degree celsius increase in temperature in our prairie land, Jackson said, may turn the prairie to a dry, hot, sandy terrain, or, some say, could even create the exact opposite effect of a wetter (but still hotter, of course) environment.

Anna Lappe spoke of her “sleuthing” at food industry conferences and what those industries are or are not doing to counter global warming. While the Grocery Manufacturers Organization held its first ever Sustainability Summit, the Meat Manufacturers Conference was void of any inquiry on the topic– this when meat production creates 18% of greenhouse emissions globally!

Monsanto, according to Lappe, puts forward the rationale that the increase of small, organic farms would take up so much space that we will be sacrificing our forests for farms. Proponents of biotech farming dispense this information to the public, creating a false impression of the real consequences of organic farming vs. chemical farming. It is true that organic farming can result in lower yields in the short term, but if we concern ourselves with the future of the human species, land that is sapped of its ability to support plant life as a result of irresponsible farming becomes the obvious loser in the production-race. Indeed, Lappe said, the inefficiency of chemical agriculture is not accounted for in many calculations (for example, the oil used to ship fertilizer across the globe).

And, anyways, hunger is not even about scarcity, it’s about democracy! We do not have a lack of food, we have unequal access and distribution. (Berry discusses democratic land distribution in Home Economics.)

Speaking of food democracy, Lappe touched on the growing consumption of meat, and how it is held that humans naturally desire meat. She asks, is this really autonomous desire? In South Korea, she recounted, she had witnessed boycott demonstrations against U.S. imported beef. They felt the beef to be unsafe and a possible carrier of mad cow disease and were critical of ad campaigns which they felt had created a demand for meat. I think of advertisements I have seen for U.S. beef. They show lean steak at very close range, so that it appears to be a landscape. Herbs appear to be trees and bushes. If eating meat is such a natural inclination, what is the use for millions of dollars spent on ad campaigns? People should just naturally seek out flesh, no? Hence, the market for meat is created through ads and through cultural ideals on the performance of wealth.

There was also much discussion on the U.S. Farm Bill signed by Mr. Bush. Pope made the argument that the farm bill is not about food for the poor at all, but is rather about the most food from the least labor. This, of course, creates unemployment, and even a permanent unemployable class. Jackson agreed, and stated that the greatest source of untapped energy on this planet is in fact, human energy.

Patrick Holden put it succinctly that “a lot needs to happen in a terrible hurry.” I firmly believe it does, and the hurry will be terrible if we don’t hurry now. However, solutions made to work in the short term, said Carl Pope, must also work for the long term. 

A rich point in the conversation was reached when, following this comment, Jackson spoke of the need to de-emphasize growth as the dominant economic ideology. This sounded to me like Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. Jackson certainly had a good point with this comment– our country in particular suffers from the Frontier Illness, which contributes to the tacit understanding that there is always space to grow into. This is what creates sprawling suburbs and decrepit inner cities; growing out leaves everything shallow. 

Pope raised issue with this idea, stating that we cannot stop thinking about growth when “three hundred million people in India want electricity.” Jackson diffused the tension by raising above his head a swatch of prairie grass he had traveled with from Kansas. The grass itself measured about 18″ long, but the thin, intertwined, knit-like roots stretched 8 ft. down. Talk about deep economy!

Slow Food Nation: What It Took To Get In

 

Farmers Equal Liberty?

I attended the three Slow Food Nation panel discussions on Saturday, August 30th. I had a ticket for the first panel on Climate Change. An amazing panel. 

 

But…. Who I really wanted to see more than anyone else was Wendell Berry. He is my hero of the land, and his writing is what sparked my interest in agriculture in the first. I hoped to snag an extra ticket somehow by asking around. Before the first panel commenced, I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me. “Are you going to the panel at 4?”

“Yes, I am.”
“I tried to get a ticket, but it was all sold out.”

“It did sell out fast. I only got a ticket because my husband is on the panel.”

“Who is your husband?”
“Wendell Berry.”

How funny. I just so happened to sit right next to Tanya Berry. I tried to conceal my excitement.

“Really? He’s the reason I want to see the talk.”

We chatted a bit, and she said, “Well, if you really wanna see it, you could just hang out in the theatre.”

I thought, Hey, good idea.

After the Climate Change panel, I went to the woman’s bathroom in the basement, where I discovered a lounge area adjacent. Some people were inside, eating lunch. I sat and wrote and thought until the next panel was about to begin. Since the bathroom was not past the ticket takers, I walked right into the second panel, on Edible Education, undetected.

Now, all I had to do was sit through this panel and hide until Wendell’s panel began. It had been so easy the first time. I would just do the same thing as before. Meanwhile, the only consumables I had brought in my bag were an Odwalla bar and a canteen of coffee— and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I was getting quite hungry as the second panel wore on. 

At the end of the panel, the discussion mediator was handed a note and announced, “Everyone, please clear the theatre between panels, and if you have a ticket, then you may reenter. We need to clear the theatre between panels. Thank you.”

Oh no, had I been detected, so close to the start of Wendell’s panel?! By now, I had to see Wendell Berry speak. I had already starved myself for some hours. 

I planned to exit near the stage, thereby avoiding the crowd in the aisles, and go in through another set of double doors near the bathroom stairs. Oh no! They have those doors closed now! I shoved my jacket into my bag and returned to the door I had exited through. I said to the girl manning the door, “I left my jacket in there. Can I go back in?” She nods. Whew. That was close. 

I go back in, make my way through the crowd and down to the basement to the women’s bathroom. I wait for the line to die down and then enter a stall. Should I stay in the stall until the panel starts? No, that’s silly. I was my hands and sit back in the lounge. A photographer readies his equipment, but other than him, I’m the only one there. I sit behind a pillar, hoping to be unnoticed, writing in my notebook just to make it appear as if I’m press, as if I’m supposed to be there. Eek. There’s a girl who is wearing a staff apron. Will she question me? I am so jacked up on caffeine that I am paranoid! 

Paradoxical, isn’t it, that I have to starve myself in order to attend the talks about slow food.

I will wait until the bathroom gets busy again. That will tell me if they have begun to let people in.

What if they are now checking tickets right at the theatre entrance? What will I say? I left my jacket? Then what? An escort?

Thirteen minutes and still undiscovered. Soon now. Soon. I also want a good seat. Is that too much to ask? What if the staff can smell my guilt?

Guilty, guilty conscience.

I overhear some ladies walking into the restroom, “Do you think people who had a ticket for the panel beforehand just stayed in here to see this one?… Oh, no. That’s right. They couldn’t. They had to leave.”

Ten minutes til showtime. Here I go.

I get a comment card from the lady with the basket. She asks me if I have a seat yet.

“No.”

“Ok, well, it’s all full down here, but you can go up to the balcony. The stairs are…”

“Oh, I’ll just go down to the stairs by the stage.”

“Ok”

I sit in a good box seat on the side balcony. I’m in!

Wendell Berry is the bomb!

It was so worth it.

Pigs and Poop Show Photos

Thanks to the help of many, the show, Pigs and Poop: Visions on a Mobile Class, was a success. Here are images of the installation and other photos not already posted.

As for those thanks, they go to Jobert Poblete, Jaala Berkley, Ashley Clark, and Adam Luetto for all their help manning the gallery. Thanks to my partner Pete Nelson for providing the guidance and technical help in formulating and setting up the show.

In this posting, I will aim at re-creation of the gallery experience. The text was a very important element in this show and served as a secondary mediator for the viewer. I utilized different fonts to eccentuate certain portions of the accompanying quotes. Unfortunately, this website does not allow for photos large enough to show the text, so I will type the quotes beneath each photo.

Please look at previous posts for more detail on the show and its origin.

“Home is a state of mind, if you will. It’s a state of comfort. Most people are dis-eased… That’s why they’re not even home when they’re in their house.”

“Every squatter has a fucking mySpace page nowadays.”

“I’m kind of like the crotch of society.”

“I can totally live without money, for eating and clothing needs, to stay warm. I guess I’m a leach eating out of dumpsters, but I don’t think I need any justification for garbage.”

“I don’t want to own anything– ever. I feel the idea of possession is exactly that: an idea.”

“There’s a lot of people that are in society and they surround themselves with all these extravagant things and worry so much about their car and what people think and their house and yada yada yada, but I mean, whenever you’re on your death-bed, you’re not going to be thinking about that shit at all. You know, I may be living in poverty, but in my pockets, I’m rich with experience.”

“I realized that most people’s troubles have to do with money. I realized that we have all the tools and technology available to accomplish all our basic goals without the money game. In fact, more efficiently without [it] than with [it]. Mostly, I try to operate as much outside of the money game as I possibly can… The real goal, I guess, is just to accomplish a sense of freedom, because freedom is something that everyone has, everyday, whether they’re aware of it or not. I guess I’m just trying to make people aware of it.”

“It’s for the train-hoppers and the gutter punks, not them. It’s our territory. I’m not trying to be an asshole. That’s just how it is.”

Photo by Stormy

“I was really, like, on my own for a while, but after I met Joel, I found out there’s like a huge, like, thousands of kids do it, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah!,’ and I hit the road …
It’s like a tribe, you know?”

“A band or pack is not a rudimentary form, but is a complex way of preventing stable power, and of maintaining diffuse, immanent relations.”
- Deleuze & Guattari

Photo by Stormy

“The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.”

-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

“The only way anything can be changed is by a full-on onslaught of revolution, which is never going to happen. People are gonna continue to be blind because that’s what the system wants them to be. Don’t ask questions, don’t ask why, don’t go outside, don’t help anybody out, just stay in your little cubicle, go in another little cubicle to make money to spend on other little cubicle boxes and just sit at home and be a good little Christian soldier, a little remote-controlled angel.”

“I’m probably never gonna settle down and like get a normal job or anything like that just cuz I can’t handle it. I don’t like it. I get stir-crazy and I go nuts, you know?”

“The State needs to subordinate hydraulic forces to conduits, pipes, embankments which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid… The hydraulic model of nomad science of the war machine, on the other hand, consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space…instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another.”

-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

“I can’t see myself going back into society the same way, having an apartment or something. Eventually, what I want to do is grow my own sustainable farm, and just grow herbs and vegetables, goats and chickens.”

“All I see here is money and consumerism. Consume, consume, consume. Like the fucking system has you by the balls and all these people think it’s leading you by the hand.”

“I wanted to change the system. I wanted to change people’s minds. I wanted to change the ideals and beliefs of everybody walking down the street. I wanted to open up their eyes to a system that fuckin destroys their lives through Television and Volvos and fuckin Cap’n Crunch and god-damn top 40 Billboard radio.”

“When they’re young they think they believe something and think they wanna do something, think they can change the world. And then hopelessness and jadedism just takes over and you realize that all you really want to do is be left alone and get a house and work and just be by yourself and collect records and guns. That’s just speaking for myself.”

“Their box, their box, their box… People get in their box to go drive somewhere—to a box, get their food in a box, then they’re eating their food in a box, get home to their box, park their box in the box. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a box in nature my entire life. It’s a really strange shape to me. [It sucks] because that’s the only thing you know. I like to be able to see. Flowing. When I’m tripping, I hate to be inside. It’s like er! er! [makes a right angle with hands] Everything needs to flow. I don’t know how to explain it. When I’m outside, I feel better for some reason. I feel that’s what I should be doing, where I should be, for me at least. These people, that’s all that they do. They never get out of their box. It’s really sad. It’s strange.”

This exhibit was dedicated to Michael “Brett” North, who was loved by his family and respected by his community. His life was lost much too soon, taken in the East River Park by a substance originally made to save.

Michael “Brett” North 1974-2006

Pigs and Poop: Visions on a Mobile Class

An exhibition of photos by anthropologist Darci J Pauser taken in the Lower East Side of NYC and Roseville, CA.

In movement through unarrayed space, one becomes external to the striated structures of the state. With this externality comes subsistence on the very waste of the internal structures. This exhibition addresses the nomadic lives of the houseless through an exploration of consumption, development, and alienation.

Worth Ryder Gallery
Kroeber Hall
UC Berkeley Campus
Opening Reception and Artist’s Talk June 1, 2007 from 7-9 pm
Gallery Hours June 2nd-7th 11am-5pm

Free and open to the public

 See also the website for the conference where I will present my non-photo fieldwork entitled “Houseless: Agents of Our Own Destruction” on April 28th at 2:45 p.m. http://research.berkeley.edu/haas_scholars/scholars/2006-2007/news/confprog.html

The photo exhibit will include photos of not only the houseless and their environment, but tract homes from my hometown of Roseville as well. In this way, it is as much about development and my own reaction to that development as about the houseless. I hope to force the semiotic meta-dialog of the houseless and the houses into a direct and pungent confrontation for the observer, as well as force the observer to question the uniformity that occurs on both sides.

“Pigs and poop” is about eating off another’s waste and is a phrase based on a story an informant told me in Berkeley, which will be elaborated upon at the exhibit. The content of the photos is what is most important to me– what each photo says about its subject and how each photo represents the houseless and the houses.

This was shot in NYC in a squat-turned-coop. I found it very interesting that this theme showed up a second time. Why the pig pooping? I feel it also says something about filth– about ‘being dirty.’ There’s also a saying: “Happy as a pig in poop.” Pigs actually don’t like to roll around in poop under ‘normal’ circumstances. If they had their choice between a cool clean lake and a pile of poop, they would cool off in the lake. However, when the lake is unavailable (like, in conditions that humans have set up for them– not the ‘natural’ condition), they will roll in poop. This is an interesting analogy to my subjects, who many would say are suffering from altered preferences. They only ‘choose’ to be homeless because they didn’t have any other options, just like the pig who can either roll in poop or overheat and die. I am skeptical of this view.

The entrance to ABC No Rio in the lower east side.

Backyard of ABC No Rio. That day, there were so many worms falling from the trees. They kept falling on me. Uck. A Puerto Rican punk band was playing inside.

A friend and an informant in NYC is peeking into a building on coney island where there used to be a freak show. I like this photo because it shows the exploratory nature of the subject. His clothing also reflects this. Unlike most of my informants, this guy did not do any drugs, nor did he drink. He just enjoyed train-hopping travel and wanted to experience different places before going to college. Notice the voodoo roll of sticks hanging above him.

Some of the photographs I took are noticably missing the head of the subject. The reason for this is the discomfort my subjects and I felt with creating such an identifiable image. As this project crosses boundaries between art and anthropology, concerns surrounding the rights of human subjects lingered in my mind. There I was as a researcher, but also as a photographer. Would the photography be considered a completely separate and solely artistic aspect of my project to my informants, as it had to the committee for the protection of human subjects? Or would it just be yet another form of exploitation and voyeuristic fetish. Although playing a part in the daily lives of the people I studied—being a person who not only interviews them, takes notes on them, and takes photographs of them, but also hangs out with, chats with, and shares cigarettes with them—did help to ease some of the exploitative tensions, they still played a part in my informants’ discomfort and my self-consciousness on undertaking the role of a researcher.

In order to further explore the possibility of creating a dialog between researcher and subject, I decided to give my subjects cameras. I didn’t know what they would photograph, I just wanted them to photograph anything they wanted to, and give them this tool of record-keeping and documentation which had begun to be so powerful to me. Perhaps they could be a voyeur and a photographer, also. I hoped it would create a dialog between what I, as researcher, saw and what they, as subjects, saw. How might the photos be framed differently? What would they see in them that I didn’t see? Would I be in them as part of their social landscape?

As soon as I picked up the first roll of film an informant took for me, I realized it was not about this dialog at all: it was first and foremost about access. I was so excited about that first roll of film that I did not realize I was keeping the photographer himself from viewing his own prints. I looked through them like a rabid dog to find any that might be aesthetically or analytically relevant. My informants took the photos, but I gave them the cameras and I got them developed, and, significantly, I kept the negatives. In truth, the vast majority of photos that were taken by the subjects were not useful for an exhibition. They were the blurry, finger-in-front-of-the-lens, posed snapshots of friends smiling into the camera, although most of the subjects posing were giving the camera the finger (which I see as relevant). But, perhaps the former has a relevance all its own…

But, as I said, these photos were mainly about access. I was able to see things they did and places they went when I wasn’t around. Here’s someone walking down the street in the city, their friend walking ten feet ahead. Here’s some graffitti of a frieght train I’ve never seen. Here’s what looks like an old abandoned office building, with a group of people sitting on couches and chairs. These latter two photos were taken in a squat in Brooklyn called the Bat Cave, a place I never had the opportunity to go to, and I had been warned against going there, anyway. Unlike the co-op ‘squats’ in manhattan, this was a structurally (and otherwise) dangerous abandoned building ridden with asbestos and soon to be torn down. I heard of someone getting raped there, and one girl I met had fallen off the second-story balcony, breaking many bones, including her jaw.